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bencollier49on Earth’s magnetic field illuminates Biblical history

Logical consistency wasn't the way I meant that it coheres!

The themes, arcs, symbolism, prophecies, moral structures, deeper messages, all of that stuff.

God, by definition, defies human understanding. In the same way that the Zen people use apparently self-contradictory statements or questions to try to get across ideas, the Bible works with more than just literal historical statements.

There's plenty of history in there too, of course. Often seen from different perspectives.

bencollier49on Christmas under the Puritans (1960)

Ha, an appropriate topic, given the lockdown restrictions on Christmas which we just narrowly avoided in the UK.

bencollier49on Google Drive may restrict files identified as violating ToS

Changing upwards of 200 logins to use a new email address may be troublesome. Do you keep a list?

bencollier49on Earth’s magnetic field illuminates Biblical history

The Bible is an account, written over thousands of years, of people's attempts to understand God. Parts of it are impenetrable unless you're on that journey yourself. What goes wrong is when people cherry-pick bits of it out of context: Shellfish, sexual mores, etc.

bencollier49on Earth’s magnetic field illuminates Biblical history

One of the reasons for the Old Testament's inclusion in Bible is to put the New Testament in context. The whole point of the New Testament is that it's a (pretty profound) development from the old one.

bencollier49on Earth’s magnetic field illuminates Biblical history

Without trying to be snarky, in my opinion that's a rather naive view of the Bible, in particular. The book forms a coherent whole with vast layers of meaning, story, interpretation and self-reference.

Unfortunately the biblical literalists of some evangelical movements don't do it justice, and they get considerably more airtime than the people who take longer to explain things.

bencollier49on Teletext Archive – open repository for teletext recoverers

Teletext was a big deal in the UK, especially for people of a certain age. The computer games "mag", "Digitiser" was quite central to games culture in the 90s.

I'm grateful to them for saving it!

bencollier49on Ask HN: How can a non-techie mom regain access to her FB account?

To my mind the fraud people probably poisoned your account in the hope that you would be locked out of FB and wouldn't notice the transaction.

bencollier49on Ask HN: How can a non-techie mom regain access to her FB account?

Could you confirm if the purchase was made through Facebook Marketplace, or if they got your card details and somehow made the purchase elsewhere?

My question above assumes that the purchase was on Marketplace.

bencollier49on Ask HN: How can a non-techie mom regain access to her FB account?

How long did it take them to process your ID and give you access back?

bencollier49on Ask HN: How can a non-techie mom regain access to her FB account?

Did you discover the £200 purchase separately?

(I'm speculating that the deliberate upload of prohibited material was to get you locked out of your account so you couldn't reverse the purchase from inside FB).

bencollier49on Remove an Omnivore's Statue? Debate Ensues over the Legacy of Factory Farming

The author has done very well here. Half the audience seem to think that the piece is a damning indictment of modern culinary habits, and the other that it's a wonderful takedown of modern iconoclasm.

Full marks! Science fiction done right.

bencollier49on New EU data blockage as German court would ban many cookie management providers

Am I reading this incorrectly? This logic seems to apply equally to simply using EU-based servers from a US-based cloud provider for storing EU personal data.

bencollier49on The Universe Is Expanding Faster Than It Should Be

Is it? That's still wedded to cause and effect, it just moves the frame of reference outside the looped universe to ask what sustains it or why it exists.

bencollier49on The Universe Is Expanding Faster Than It Should Be

Well we can use this to execute a reductio ad absurdam on scientific materialism. Let us assume that the logic of cause and effect is all there is to the universe. Then the big bang must have had a cause, and that cause a cause in turn, and so on. That's obviously absurd, even if we point at time beginning with the big bang. Within any human reasoning, things do not appear ex nihilo.

The alternative is that the thing on which our universe depends (being careful not to say 'caused' here) is beyond our ideas of cause and effect, and certainly passes human understanding.

bencollier49on Ask HN: My client want an agent on my laptop. Is this the new normal?

Just out of interest - what happens if you have multiple clients who both want a Drata agent installed? Do you know how well it handles multiple servers?

bencollier49on The Bastard Operator from Hell (1999)

"It's backup day today so I'm pissed off. Being the BOFH, however, does have it's advantages. I reassign null to be the tape device - it's so much more economical on my time as I don't have to keep getting up to change tapes every 5 minutes. And it speeds up backups too, so it can't be all bad can it? Of course not."

So not quite everything he gets up to is fantasy.

bencollier49on Ask HN: Are Cybersecurity Workers Ok?

I'm tempted to rather rudely suggest that the people who managed to get a job on a helpdesk without any qualifications and then worked their way up to an "old-school" bureaucratic security manager position might feel threatened by graduates with new fangled ideas about DevSecOps.

bencollier49on uBlacklist: Blocks specific sites from appearing in Google search results

Thank you. Came here to say the same thing. It's a blight on the Web.

bencollier49on Predict civilization collapse with Python and World3 model

Yes. Checking this via various sources online shows that the predictions are that capital intensity will reach 50% of all investment by 2020, at which point the collapse begins.

https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/00...

bencollier49on Predict civilization collapse with Python and World3 model

More like 2015 from what I read in those graphs.

bencollier49on The Great British Reading List

I fear that your objective judgements may be biased.

bencollier49on The Great British Reading List

A "Great British" list of books shouldn't focus in the majority on left-wing critique. Like I said elsewhere, I'll give you the marmalade, but the rest is the product of metropolitan miserabilists.

bencollier49on The Great British Reading List

"Why I'm utterly sick of going for a walk" strikes at British culture in a very particularly Guardianish way. Then we have a class diatribe and a Brexit moan. I'll give you the marmalade.

bencollier49on The Great British Reading List

This is an excellent analysis, thank you.

bencollier49on The Great British Reading List

That's what all the current hoohah is about, and it's cooked up by the media.

bencollier49on The Great British Reading List

So instead of reading this nasty list of anti-British propaganda pieces, there's an actually decent list of British books, which was put online by "Culture Trip", whoever they are:

https://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/england/art...

This covers a wide range of history, and does cover (pre)modern culture - Zadie Smith's "White Teeth", for example.

bencollier49on Toxicity Dataset

Who on earth has appointed themselves as the arbiter of "toxicity"? Half the comments marked as "toxic" are just political opinions or sentences with bad language in them.

I tend to align with the person who suggested that the word "toxic" was just a secular isomorph of "sinful".

bencollier49on How to run a small social network site for your friends

Why's that then?

bencollier49on Amazon’s search results are full of ads ‘unlawfully deceiving’ consumers

Good luck finding proper brands in the search results. Four times out of five, weird names that I've never heard of dominate the results to the point where it's impossible to filter for a known brand.